Award recognizes outstanding faculty collaborations at IU Bloomington

Editor's note: This release has been updated to reflect the fact that the research presentations were rescheduled from an earlier date.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Two teams of Indiana University Bloomington faculty have been awarded the 2016 Outstanding Faculty Collaborative Research Award, jointly offered by the Office of the Provost and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research. The award recognizes collaborative faculty teams for their accomplishments in research, scholarship and creative activities.

“The Bloomington campus has a long tradition of cross-disciplinary collaborations among our faculty, and the Outstanding Faculty Collaborative Research Award and Lecture recognizes particularly powerful and innovative collaborations,” said IU Bloomington Provost and Executive Vice President Lauren Robel. “We are so pleased that the inaugural projects led to important discoveries and innovations in a number of fields, while also expanding the vibrant intellectual connections among our faculty. We look forward to seeing the exciting work produced by this year’s recipients.”

The award includes a $15,000 stipend to each team of collaborators to support their research programs. This year, awards have been made to two teams. Both teams will give presentations about their projects at 3 p.m. Dec. 7 at the IU Cinema. A reception will follow the lecture in the Social Science Research Commons, Woodburn Hall 200. The lecture and reception are open to the public.

“The selected projects in this award program continue to be excellent models for future faculty collaborations, some involving quite diverse partners,” said Rick Van Kooten, vice provost for research at IU Bloomington. “We are very pleased to present this award to two outstanding teams who are making such distinctive scholarly contributions through their collaborative work.”

Novick and Phillips have collaborated on a number of projects to better understand interactions between the climate system and the forests of the Eastern United States, specifically how much carbon dioxide these forests remove from the atmosphere each year and how much water the ecosystems use in the process. In their presentation, “The Breath of Trees: Interactions Between Eastern U.S. Forests and the Climate System,” Novick and Phillips will discuss how measurements of plant physiology and meteorology can be combined with tree ring studies and soils data to examine the potential impacts of droughts on the global carbon cycle.

Storey and Walsh’s presentation, “Intricate Simplicity: Editorial and Digital Design in the Petrarchive Project,” features their collaboration on Petrarch’s “Canzoniere,” one of the most influential collections of poetry in world literature. With initial seed funding from IU’s New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities program, Storey and Walsh have spent the past several years developing digital representations of Petrarch’s complex medieval texts. Their lecture presentation will provide an overview and sampling of the editorial and design solutions they’ve created for their digital edition of Petrarch’s masterwork.